“We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high,” wrote Musk on X, which he owns.
The Tesla chief was reacting to the irregularities reportedly discovered in the EVMs during Puerto Rico‘s primary elections.
According to several media reports, there were hundreds of irregularities in the EVMs and multiple glitches were noted. However, a paper trail allowed the votes polled to be tallied, which averted possible counting discrepancies.
Reliability of EMVs for polling has also been a raging issue in India, with the opposition demanding the old electoral process of paper ballots.
However, the Supreme Court in April this year expressed its unwillingness to pass any order regarding EVMs only on the basis of suspected hacking and manipulation, while stating that it would not flinch from ensuring steps for improvement if it saw the need for any.
Before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls began, the Election Commission rubbished reports that EVMs erroneously registered votes in favour of ruling BJP during mock polling in Kerala.
It had told the Supreme Court that till date, only one instance of mismatch between EVM and VVPAT counting was detected – in 2019 because of human error.
At the start of the hearing, the “glitch” in Kerala was brought to the court’s notice and a bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta asked EC to verify it. After lunch break, EC told the bench that the news report was wrong and proceeded to convince the court that there was no way to tamper with the machines.
The EC also rejected the opposition INDIA bloc’s demand to revert to the old system of counting of postal ballots prior to the last round of EVM counting, saying that counting rules could not be changed mid-course.